FDR and the Jews

Richard Breitman, Allan J. Lichtman

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674073678
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler's Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America's gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz's gas chambers.In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician-compassionate but also pragmatic-struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to others' fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from his advisers and the American public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists abroad.Though his actions may seem inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure. His moral position was tempered by the political realities of depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American politicians in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rise and Fall of FDR

AT THE AGE of eighty-six, four months before her death, Mrs. Roosevelt traveled to Toronto, Canada, to address a Jewish women’s group. Three years earlier, the Jewish Forum had awarded her the Einstein Medal for lifetime humanitarian service to the Jewish people. This Mrs. Roosevelt was not Franklin’s wife Eleanor, who became renowned for her human rights advocacy. Rather, it was Franklin’s mother, the Grand Dame Sara Delano Roosevelt, who died in 1941, just four years before her son.

In the warm and nurturing home of Sara and his father James Sr., at Hyde Park, ninety miles north of New York City, young Franklin seemed to have gained the self-assurance and wise counsel needed to escape the anti-Semitism that was so common among upper-class Protestants. Like his parents, Franklin took pride in his Protestant heritage, and would later proclaim his membership in the “Aryan races.” Yet, this pride did not translate into disdain for Jews. James Sr., who was fifty-three years old at the time of Franklin’s birth in 1882, had business dealings with Jews. He counseled his son about the immorality of anti-Semitism and his contempt for it. Sara was a proper patrician woman with an acute sense of class, who made friends with Jews and engaged in charitable work for Jewish causes. Throughout his adult life, FDR would be open to Jewish contacts and concerns.¹

As an only child, Franklin’s life revolved around gaining the attention and admiration of adults, especially his parents. James and Sara cultivated in their son the qualities of self-confidence and compassion for the less fortunate. From his formative years through struggles with paralysis in early middle age, Roosevelt loved to be the center of attention and believed that he was destined to perform great deeds in the service of humanity. He developed stoical traits of character that stressed discipline, responsibility, and trust in his own judgment. He learned how to set firm priorities, to give others no more than what he considered their due, to keep his inner thoughts private, and to deflect external pressure with winning charm and subtle persuasion so as not to be swayed from his course. Jewish leaders, like other supplicants, would find the future president Roosevelt equally sympathetic and elusive.²

Young Franklin learned well from private tutors and worked hard to meet or exceed expectations. Sara and James introduced him to sports and sailing, shooting, family history, foreign languages, culture, and travel. He developed lifelong interests in stamp collecting, geography, and history, which later provided him an independent vision of the world. Franklin’s parents told him stories about his Dutch and Belgian Huguenot (Protestant) and early American ancestors. For this family, the Protestants were the heroes of Enlightenment Europe who challenged the reactionary Catholic Church and oppressive monarchs. Already, FDR had a sense of the “rights” and “wrongs” of history.³

In 1896, the fourteen-year-old Franklin entered the small Groton boarding school in Massachusetts. Like English public schools, Groton sought to train a privileged white Protestant class of boys to be disciplined and tough enough for God’s work as leaders of the nation. After years of his family’s adoration, Franklin had to face merciless adolescent peers, some of whom called him the “feather duster” (after his initials F. D.) because they found him shallow and conceited. Groton’s headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, put athletic competition above academics as the best preparation for leadership. Although Franklin did not excel at sports, the resourceful young man earned a team letter as equipment manager for the baseball team.⁴

Like all but two of his Groton classmates, FDR went on to college at Harvard. There he might have encountered Jews in the student body, but not on the faculty. Although Jewish students comprised 6 percent of Harvard’s enrollment in 1906, two years after FDR’s graduation, FDR’s social life revolved exclusively around Protestant, high-society clubs. His prolific extracurricular agenda showed diverse interests, a strong work ethic, and a humanitarian conscience. He helped found the Political Club, which promoted interest in politics and good government, and served as an officer of Harvard’s Social Service Committee, the Harvard Union. He demonstrated compassion for persecuted peoples by signing on to the Boer Relief Fund, formed by students to “assist in relieving the distress of the Boer women and children confined in British concentration camps in South Africa.” FDR was one of three students to whom contributors could send donations.⁵

Roosevelt participated in Christian religious and charitable activities through the Christian Association and the Episcopalian St. Paul’s Society. FDR’s Hyde Park family had attended the local Episcopalian Church. Roosevelt’s mentor, Reverend Peabody, was an Episcopal priest, and young Roosevelt identified as an Episcopalian throughout his life. For FDR, religion was a matter of private faith and public service in the Peabody tradition. He did not proclaim his beliefs to the world, seek to convert others, or regularly attend church. He held a flexible view of Christianity, attuned to its ethical teaching, and adapted to the findings of modern science and enlightened social thought. FDR despised doctrinal disputes and, for his time, held a tolerant view of other faiths.⁶

Although Roosevelt earned mediocre grades, he studied with such noted history and government professors as Edward Channing, A. Lawrence Lowell, William Z. Ripley, Silas Marcus MacVane, Roger Bigelow Merriman, and visiting professor Frederick Jackson Turner. Roosevelt enrolled in several courses with Professor MacVane on constitutional government, English and European history, and studied English and German history with Professor Merriman. These big thinkers reinforced FDR’s vision of history as Protestantism and liberty versus Catholicism and despotism. Merriman and FDR became friends and correspondents. “Your ancient teachings,” FDR wrote in November 1933, “have stood your old pupil in good stead in the development of more modern history.”⁷

FDR’s work as editor in chief of the Crimson late in his Harvard career reflected his service ethic and a disdain for supercilious wealth and privilege. His editorial admonishing students who failed to join the Harvard Union, blamed not “men really unable to afford” the dues, but “those who fail to do so solely from laziness, meanness, or lack of interest in the University.” Another editorial defended academics: “Of late years, however, the prominence of the unacademic side of university life has, perhaps, been unduly emphasized … the purely scholarly side has not been given enough importance.” Still, FDR never pursued scholarship. His twenty-fifth Harvard Reunion statement in 1929 said that he planned to “defer serious writing until after the Class of 1904 had had its 50th Reunion.” Yet, Roosevelt genuinely respected scholarly achievement and ultimately relied more on close academic advisers than any prior president.⁸

In 1938, during dinner-party conversation, FDR confided to Courtney Letts de Espil, the American-born wife of the Argentine ambassador, private thoughts about his high school and college years. Both he and Sumner Welles, his undersecretary of state, Roosevelt said, “were disliked heartily now by most of those with whom we went to school [Groton] or to Harvard.” He added, “I don’t believe they liked either of us very much at the time.… They disliked anyone who even took the trouble to read a daily newspaper and wonder what was going on in the world—and to inquire how the other half lived.” This attitude within Harvard’s elite may explain why FDR never received an invitation to join Porcellian, the university’s most exclusive club, which included his father and Theodore Roosevelt as members. This snub rankled FDR for years and may well have fueled his political ambitions.⁹

FDR did not subscribe to a strict meritocracy. He later confided to his Hyde Park neighbor (and secretary of the treasury) Henry Morgenthau Jr. that in the 1920s he had supported efforts to reduce the number of Jews at Harvard because each group should have its share of places and no group should gain undue representation.¹⁰

In 1900, during Franklin’s first year at Harvard, his father died. The following year, cousin Theodore became the Republican vice president of the United States and then, after anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, assumed the presidency. President Theodore Roosevelt brought a progressive domestic program to his Republican Party. TR’s ideas and personality impressed young Franklin, who prompted some derision at Harvard by mimicking TR’s mannerisms. But he remained loyal to his father’s Democratic Party.

After Harvard, FDR entered Columbia Law School. Although he performed poorly in classes, he passed the bar exam during his third year, dropped out, and began to practice law. Yet the impatient and politically ambitious young man lacked interest in the practice or theory of the law. His thought tended to the factual and the anecdotal rather than the conceptual or analytic. Franklin’s self-confidence, composure, and interest in public life kept him from probing deeply into philosophical or religious matters.

While at Columbia, in 1905, Franklin married his twenty-year-old distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, TR’s niece. Despite her adoration of Franklin, Eleanor fretted over his neglect of home life and the meddling in her husband’s life of her domineering mother-in-law Sara, who never remarried and still doted on her son. Eleanor, who viewed herself as painfully tall, awkward, and plain, worried about holding the romantic attention of the strikingly handsome Franklin. He stood about six feet, one inch tall with a lean, athletic build. He had blue eyes, dark wavy hair, a strong jaw, and a jaunty manner. As a young man, he also had a disconcerting habit of throwing back his head and looking down his nose at others through his eyeglasses. Yet for Franklin his marriage to Eleanor was a step up. She was the niece of the president of the United States, whereas he came from the obscure side of the Roosevelt clan. The press gushed about President Roosevelt giving away the bride, but fairly ignored the groom.¹¹

FDR suspended his unhappy law practice in 1910 and entered politics. He confounded the conventional wisdom by winning a State Senate election as a Democrat in his Republican-leaning rural district. FDR had barely located his seat in the back benches of the Senate chamber when he led an insurgent crusade against the Democratic machine, taking a big risk with potentially big rewards. In 1911, two years before the Seventeenth Amendment required the direct election of U.S. senators, the New York State Legislature was poised to select as senator the former lieutenant governor, William F. Sheehan, an Irish Catholic and the handpicked candidate of New York City’s corrupt Democratic machine, Tammany Hall. Some twenty bolting Democrats, led by the twenty-eight-year-old first-term senator FDR, blocked Sheehan’s selection. Like Democratic governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, who fought the U.S. Senate appointment of party boss James Smith Jr., young FDR framed the battle against Sheehan as a lofty progressive crusade to give ordinary Americans a say in their government.

Tammany leaders insinuated that anti-Catholic bigotry drove Roosevelt to oppose Sheehan’s appointment. The bishop of Syracuse, Patrick Ludden, seconded the charges. FDR responded by urging his opponents “not to let race or religion enter into this fight.” He briefly backed the candidacy of another Catholic, John D. Kernan, a former state railroad commissioner, to prove his point. The still callow Roosevelt was learning how to play religious politics with the masters of the game.¹²

As an alternative to Sheehan, Roosevelt vetoed Samuel Untermyer, a Jewish civic leader and lawyer. The combative Untermyer, a self-made millionaire, attributed Roosevelt’s opposition not to prejudice against Jews, but to the subterranean influence of J. P. Morgan and Company and other magnates. Roosevelt’s insurgents were not selfless reformers, he charged, but venal politicians like the Tammany Democrats. FDR predictably denied that “the influence of any special interest affected in any way the choice of a United States Senator.”¹³

Ultimately, in late March 1912, the bosses ditched Sheehan, but induced the bolters to support another Irish Catholic, State Judge James A. O’Gorman, who also had close ties to Tammany Hall. FDR, who was learning how to spin events, hailed O’Gorman’s selection as a victory over the machine. The New York Times lauded Roosevelt as one of a handful of young Americans “unknown four years ago who have jumped into fame and become factors in national affairs.”¹⁴

Young senator Roosevelt articulated his first progressive philosophy in a March 3, 1912, speech at Troy, New York. He grounded civilized progress in the “Aryan races,” which had for “the past thousand years … been struggling to obtain individual freedom.” With this battle won, he said, new times required a “struggle for the liberty of the community rather than liberty of the individual,” with progressive government advancing reforms for the common good. Most American Jews would have scoffed at Roosevelt’s equation of Aryan races with civilized progress. Still, FDR had a commonplace white Anglo-Saxon Protestant racial vision for his times.¹⁵

FDR might have faded from history at the age of 30 if not for the assistance of an indispensable new aide, the brilliant, acerbic, chain-smoking, and chronically disheveled journalist Louis McHenry Howe. When Roosevelt fell ill with typhoid fever, Howe so skillfully ran his absentee campaign for state senator that FDR won reelection despite recycled Republican rumors about his anti-Catholic bigotry. It was another lesson in FDR’s education about the toxic mixing of politics and religion. Yet the religiously charged words he chose after the election showed that his education remained incomplete. “Any candidate who brings any question of religion into politics,” he wrote, “acts in a manner wholly un-American and unChristian, and is not fitted to be the holder of any office.”¹⁶

The amateur yachtsman was learning to navigate the religious politics of New York State. Catholics and Jews accounted for about a quarter of the voters in the state and a much larger percentage of Democrats. Two of the brightest young stars within the Democratic Party of 1912 were Catholics and Tammany Hall regulars: Robert F. Wagner, president pro tem of the State Senate, and Al Smith, Democratic leader of the State Assembly. These men represented a new generation of machine-bred politicians who favored policies to increase the efficiency of government, curb the abuses of business, and improve the conditions of labor. Several Jews also represented New York City in the state legislature. FDR joined with Jewish assemblyman Mark Goldberg of New York City to cosponsor the Roosevelt-Goldberg Bill on civil service reform.¹⁷

The Democratic Party relied considerably on Jewish money. In 1912, nine Jewish donors from New York State donated some $85,000 to the National Democratic Campaign Fund. Bernard Baruch, Abram Elkus, Hy Goldman, Charles Guggenheim, Henry Morgenthau Sr., Jacob Schiff, James Speyer, Nathan Straus Sr., and Untermyer contributed 24 percent of Democratic funds collected from New York State and 7.5 percent of funds raised nationwide. Morgenthau served as finance chair of the Democratic Party in 1912 and 1916. Jewish money for Democratic coffers would continue to matter significantly during FDR’s years in national politics.¹⁸

In 1912, FDR backed the winning presidential campaign of fellow prog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Four Roosevelts
• 1. The Rise and Fall of FDR
• 2. FDR Returns
• 3. The Democrat and the Dictator
• 4. Immigration Wars
• 5. Transitions
• 6. Moving Millions?
• 7. Resettlement in Latin America?
• 8. Toward War
• 9. Tightened Security
• 10. Wartime America
• 11. Debating Remedies
• 12. Zionism and the Arab World
• 13. The War Refugee Board
• 14. Negotiations and Rescue in Hungary
• 15. Endings
• 16. Perspectives
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index